Customer and Marketing Communications Management Case Study
Situation
A credit card company spends a lot of money establishing point of sale facilities at airports, shopping centres and other areas where there is a lot of public traffic.
This has been a successful strategy but the level of people signing up at the stands was not matched by the number of people who signed the contract when they received it in the mail.
The length of time that the contract has taken to get to the customer means that the customer has either changed his mind or, prompted by the idea of getting a new card found a better deal.
Solution
The company recognised that the issue with conversion lay in the time it takes for mail to arrive at the customers home.
Retail: on Being Unique
How is it that some companies are able to expand in this time of economic strife while others cannot?
Well, it wasn’t some form of magic that helped these retailers survive and do better than others in difficult times. They had information and they used it.
Information is the key. These retailers know that this situation is not permanent, and many have been through similar economic times and survived; many have even thrived.
Part of this information is having the ability to know where customers are coming from and then using this data to know where to focus marketing dollars or even to determine where a new store location should be.
At this time, commercial real estate is in a bind and there are many empty locations. This makes it quite possible to work out a short term lease to not only move merchandise but also test new locations. Or for many of you who are in locations with empty store fronts adjacent to your stores, or at least in the same center, you can contact your center management and take advantage of these empty windows to promote your own location.
More importantly, information also tells a retailer what kind of merchandise to buy and how much of it they should purchase. Guessing and “looking” at inventory will eventually begin to bite into a retailer’s profits without them even realizing what is causing it.